Column: Gaming our brains

By Ted C. Fishman

Americans are spending $300 million a year, and millions of hours, on computer-based brain exercises to ward off the cognitive declines that come with age. I understand this. At 53, I am part of an age group whose powers of memory or mental quickness are still strong, but whose occasional "senior moments" feel like unwelcome warnings of worse yet to come.

Brain gaming: Americans are spending $300 million a year on online brain exercises such as Lumosity.

Brain gaming: Americans are spending $300 million a year on online brain exercises such as Lumosity.

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The mainstream of cognitive science now recognizes that people maintain a good ability to learn nearly all their lives, but that memory and mental-processing speeds decline more once we pass through young adulthood. For those in late middle-age, the chances for dementia are climbing every year, too. Over the past seven years, the business of delivering brain exercises over computer screens, cellphones and game consoles has emerged out of a marriage of science, entertainment and the online economy into what could soon be a a vast global industry to treat the brain.

Lumosity, a Web-based series of games described as "brain training," garnered $32 million in venture capital funding last year, and this year announced it has a stunning 20 million members. (The trial membership is free.) I find the pitches of companies intriguing, but I wish they were convincing. It is still very early in the game. So far, I cannot help thinking that most of the products prey on their customers' weaknesses of mind more than they reverse them.

The first big breakthrough in the business of digital brain fitness was created by the Japanese electronic gaming company Nintendo. In 2005, it released the first of its popular Brain Age series of games for its hand-held game consoles. Brain Age was developed with input from brain scientist Ryuta Kawashima, whose research showed that performing mental exercises — reading aloud or working through simple arithmetic problems — stimulates a person's dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in ways that inactivity (which still requires mental processing) does not.

Clinical merit?

Kawashima's findings led to the hope that the right exercises and games could improve a variety of core brain processes. Neither Kawashima nor Nintendo ever suggested outright that the Brain Age series had clinical merit. Since the games appeared, however, Kawashima has conducted research on whether they really do make a difference. His conclusions to date are still guarded.

To actually improve cognition, brain fitness must create a "transfer effect," which means people who use a program to train on one kind of task improve on a variety of unrelated tasks. One big industry player, PositScience, offers a program that trains older clients, who have difficulty parsing out sounds where there is a lot of ambient noise. The exercises aim to re-quicken their mental processing so they can better distinguish among different audible tones. If successful, the exercises should help users who come to distinguish tones quicker to process other information faster, too. The jury is still out on how powerful these transfer effects can be.

"Train people on programs, and they get better at the programs," says Richard Restak, of George Washington University School of Medicine, who has authored 20 books on the brain. The brain is not like the rest of the body, Restak explains. "If you train for a race, you can swim longer. But, in general, training people for mental tasks only improves them for that task."

Big market

What Brain Age did prove, however, is that there is a market for brain exercises. Brain fitness companies now hail from the U.S., Canada, Germany and Israel, many springing up near strong centers for brain research. A small army of brain scientists with links to top universities has joined with private sector entrepreneurs to create the brain regimens. The big players in the market have research programs that draw in university scientists and give them the opportunity to study the fitness of the programs' users. Collecting data on 20 million users is an enticing prospect. No longer just in the game aisle, the programs now reach into businesses, clinical environments and retirement homes.

On the upside, the programs certainly do no harm. They also give users a chance to be part of a huge experiment that might prove the scientific worthiness of the brain fitness program. Part of the bargain seems to be that the investigators, when marketing the products, walk a careful line that preserves the hype but never overtly promises much of anything.

Look at the marketing material for some of the leaders in the brain fitness arena. They offer all sorts of impressionistic testimonials from users who like the programs. That's the opposite of scientific evidence. And they describe their programs as designed with the brain science in mind. That does not mean they work. Yes, there are studies that show some successes among some users doing some sorts of exercises. Yet, Restak notes, the existing studies have not been nearly comprehensive enough to warrant much optimism.

One testimonial video features Indre Viskontas, of the University of California-San Francisco's Memory and Aging Center. She talks about how brains can be exercised just as other muscles can. But then comes a big hedge, wrapped as a promise: "This is uncharted territory," Viskontas says, "and because we don't know where the boundary is, it is very possible that that boundary is limitless." OK, but does that mean the companies that sell this stuff need to ignore boundaries, too?

Ted Fishman, author of Shock of Gray and China, Inc., is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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